Russ Folsom has kindly written this article on the Lebensborn.
The 'Lebensborn e.V.' [eingetragener Verein] 'Fount of Life' Registered Society, was actually established 12.12.1935. As Chief of German Police, RFSS Himmler">Himmler was privy to abortion statistics, and in the beginning visualized the Lebensborn orphanages as a more worthy alternative, which would also bolster the inter-war decline of births in Germany. However, from the start, the foundation's charter was fraught with the neo-mystical nordic 'blut und ehre' nonsense which included a mandatory 'contribution' by the top echelon of the SS leadership to 'seed' the undertaking. The cover of the orphanage was, like so many things in NS Germany, a euphemism for a more disturbing reality; the Lebensborn were actually to fit into the larger Nazi scheme of both 'strengthening the race', and creating multitudes of 'rassenrein' kinder for the elite of an envisioned [SS] super state.
The Lebensborn Organization created a number of secluded 'resorts' in the scenic countryside of Bavaria in which 'SS Officer Cadets' from the SS-Junkerschulen at Bad Tolz and Braunschweig could visit racially certified females usually drawn from the NS Frauens-Org, BDM, etc, and co-habitate for the bolstering of the Reich birth rate. As the war began, and these SS officers began to fall in battle in a very large way, Himmler">Himmler instituted a policy (even among married officers), of mandatory visits to Lebensborn when on leave from the Front. These officers and soldiers had the symbol of the 'Lebensborn e.V.' the 'Leben-Rune', whic h looks like an inverted 'peace symbol', stamped in their paybooks, and added to their column in the 'SS-Dienstalterliste' (service seniority record) as officially having contributed to the race.
The October 1939 exhortation to single German women to 'dispense' with the bourgeois custom of marraige to conceive children (as noted above) was an indication that the RFSS was preparing for a large wartime spilling of the 'rassenrein blut' of his SS elite. All indicators, from the numbers of SS-VT men (SS-Verfugungstruppen - SS Special purpose troops) who had fallen in battle in Poland alone, pointed to a large thinning of the ranks to come in the anticipated battles against the Western, and later Soviet, powers.
The reason for the disproportionally high number of SS casualties in the September 1939 Polish campaign (considering their comparatively diminutive numbers distributed among the Feldheer), especially among junior level officers, may have had something to do with their eagerness to do battle, as chronicled in 'Das Schwarze Korps', but it is often more realistically speculated that the burgeoning ranks of what would one day be the dread 'Waffen-SS', were simply 'inadequately trained'; and consequently took more casualties. Pre-war training was filled with a strong diet of 'ideology' and 'drill', but had little to counterbalance the inexperience of their mid level and junior officer cadre. As a matter of fact, while the Heer was officially tasked to train the officers of the SS-VT and later W-SS, only relatively few of their mid level officers were able to attend professional Army staff training before the outbreak of war.
Although most of the well known histories of the SS by authors such as Hoehne, Reitlinger et al. include a mention of the 'Lebensborn', I know of few scholarly english language studies devoted strictly to the subject itself. An exception is the rather recent UK publication 'Master Race: The Lebensborn Experiment in Nazi Germany' by Caterine Clay and Michael Leapman (Hodder and Stoughton, 1995). Also, readers of German will be pleased to note that there is a concise and comprehensive treatment on the Lebensborn to be found on the web at:
http://www.vho.org/D/dsdv/Seidler.html
This is a scholarly article by Franz W.Seidler, LEBENSBORN e.V. Der SS -
Vom Geru(e)cht zur Legende' (Lebensborn e.V. der SS - From Rumour to Legend')
Seidler is a popular German historian who has also written a respectable history on the hundreds of thousands of women who served in the German armed forces during the Second war titled: 'BLITZMAEDCHEN: Die Geschichte der Helferinnen der deutschen Wehrmacht' (Blitz Girls: The history of the women's auxilliaries of the German armed forces).
He has also written a vividly documented volume on Soviet war crimes against German soldiers titled: 'VERBRECHEN AN DER WEHRMACHT:Kriegsgreuel der Roten Armee 1941/42' (Crimes against the Armed forces: War atrociites of the Red Army 1941/42).